what is life?

[OilFight]

what makes you think that human is the head of evolution?if you go with your dog for a walk and you meet another dog, i think that the dog will pay more attention to the other dog rather than you!!you may say that we are higher in evolution because we dominated on earth, but i am not so sure about that, because dinosaurs were the dominated species once.can you consider them higher than human?

Who thinks this ? I don't see anyone on this thread implying that we "the most evolved" species on earth, how would one even define what is "more" evolved anyway?

[minaras]

sorry!!!it was mostly a general philosophical question

[Dragohunter]

The real question is if life is just a bunch of atoms connected in a special way or something else. This is more of a philosophical question rather than biological.

[DEFCON_1]

I think "what is life" is an irrelevant question. It is, and so be it because it is. simply put.

I think a beefier quesiton can be why is life?

by that nobody can really give a qualified answer. We can either state "i don't know" or we can leave a faith in something having a sort of divine plan for all of these ocurances to give rise to this thing called life. Otherwise it simply can't be explained by our manmade minds.

For any "humanists" out there who believe life and the universe was created for man to have his way with, remember that man has no place 20 000 leagues under the sea where life continues to exsist. The mere variety of life on this planet alone is proof enough all of that is not for us to consume and utilize. Yet most of you still do rather selfishly.

modern human life is a glorious state in that we can manipulate almost anything, do anything our minds can imagine (limited to the laws of universal physics) in that can basicly manipulate anything known of in the physical universe. This ability to manipulate freely and do as our will intends is almost a gift. Seeing as it was a fluke that we were given the planet over the dinosaurs. The human is'nt a dominant species in that the reptile is a more prevalent species. however it is doubtful the reptile contemplates its' exsistence. Therefore giving rise to the purpose of a human who Does contemplate this.

Whether you believe in a God or not , something is the governing force giving way to these occurances. For it after all ultimately gave you the gift of human consciousness.

[minaras]

continue from previous

Of course, when we are talking about chains of chemical reactions, we do not mean it in the simplistic way, that they are in a chain, and everything is happening in an order, where the formed substance goes to the next position to react with the next substrate etc. Things in nature are much more random, and it is difficult sometimes for us to detect which is the next step.One of the major difficulties are some passive phenomena that happen, such as plasma flow, passive diffusion through membranes because of difference in concentration, or electrical gradients, excretion throught ducts, etc.The latter are phenomena that happen passively ,due to the laws of nature and are not defining life, the way the chemical reactions do. To be more symbolical, they play the role that scientists play in a chemical lab:they transfer the substances from one tube to another, arrarge the conditions, etc.But the chemical reactions are the big difference.

Of course , if these movements that we are talking about were not there, we would not be the way we are.We are the results of all these , and so it is normal to think that if something was not the way it is, WE would not be there, the way we are!So we think that they are essential for us and everything was arranged perfectly, and if something was a bit different ,we would not be there, but as i told everything depends on who is the observer.We are a changing complex, and everything that happens lead to us.We see things from the opposite side though.It is like we are in a moving ship, and so we realize things differentl from someone who is standing in the port.Most of all we dont have a good sence of our own movement.If we were not in the living system, we would not find any reasoning for all the creatures on earth.Even if we were tables for example, we would think that the most perfect creatures are the tables.All depends on what is the observer.

[SQLserver]

Life is nothing besides chemicals interacting. This is generally accepted in biology.

It is naive to assume that humans are any different. It is also incorrect to assume that there is something mysterious about the human mind, or something about it that doesn't fit in with science.

Edited September 27, 2008 by sqlserver

[OilFight]

Life is nothing besides chemicals interacting. This is generally accepted in biology.

It is naive to assume that humans are any different. It is also incorrect to assume that there is something mysterious about the human mind, or something about it that doesn't fit in with science.

My thoughts exactly, it's only through our ability to create tools and a higher-than-average intelligence that we have been able to create civilization, technology, philosophy, and all that jazz. Any animal with the capacity to manipulate objects for specific purposes and enough curiosity could get to our level given the right circumstances.

[Repoman]

So, a simple chemical reaction as long as it happens ,is the simpliest form of life, or else, the sparkle of life.

This distinction between "form of life" and "sparkle of life" is far more significant than you allow for in the rest of your post.

In fact, what you really said is "a simple chemical reaction is life or it isn't life".

So which is it? This question is important because the rest of your post relies on it.

[minaras]

In this point, someone would ask:Why are the forms of life the way they are today?In other words, what gave them their shape, and their characteristics?How can simple reactions lead to the complicated forms we see today?The answer is that the forms we see today are the result of what had happened, so we(the results), see ourselves as the most capable to survive, which is true, because thats what happened through time!as we told, virtually we see history from the opposite side, or else ,we see the theory of evolution from the end towards the beggining

[minaras]

i would like to answer to some points here:

Repoman:Actually the whole idea is that the definition of life is made only because we are a part of it.We call life everything that looks like us.As long as a virus or a spore has metabolism and make similar processes like us, we call it alive, but when they have zero metabolism, we find it hard to consider it alive.Fire on the other hand doesnt look enough like us to consider it alive.

Life is a creation of our mind, to describe anything that is like us,eg an ongoing system of reactions.It doesnt exist as an objective thing in the universe.For example a stone that is travelling million light years away from earth, can only see a soup of random, meaningless chemical reactions near the surface of earth, because it is not participating in the system....!So the distinction between sparkle an form of life is mostly artificial.

Sorry, for not answering to everybody that posted here , but i promise i will do it soon...

[minaras]

to bmd:

life cannot be sustained in isolation.If you place a single cell in space, it will definitey die, without something to interact.The first cell was exactly that:an isolated cell in space.

The only way to overcome this problem is to think out of the box and not reject the idea that reactions could have been before structures and molecules( in fact the first molecules could have been much simpler, ever inorganic , and even not carbon based),

to BELLOWIM:

this is the true essence of scientific progress:detaching scientific thought from human conception.

If this never happened, we would still believe the earth is flat and the stars are moving around the still earth...............

we have to be ready and brave enough to move farther from our safe shore, in order to discover new worlds....

[minaras]

to oilfight,SQLserver,: I would like to segregate the two kind of products of human mind and intelligence.

The first is technology, music, art, all that jazz etc, that are human made, and their goal is to support and offer solution to human needs.They are the product of brain complexity and their goal is to make human life a lot easier and better.But of course ,their usefullness is appreciated by us , only because it serves our needs, but on the other side, they mean absolutely nothing to other living creatures, or non living material.

For example, if we were birds that use complicated techniques to build nests, we, with the brain that we have ,would consider our brain the highest level of evolutionary procedures, and underrate completely the importance of human creations.

So, we cannot consider our brain the top, only judging by human centered achievements.

The second product of human intelligence is knowledge of the world, and understanding our position in the universe.This knowledge is absolutely objective.There is only ONE truth, irrespectably of the situation of our brain.For instance, if we fall in a coma, the world will continue to exist, and the continuity of events can be presicely find out by us ,with asking others, after we recover. There will normaly be no flaws.We live in the universe.not the universe in us.

This objective knowledge, though human centered to want to know it, not necessarily we should think super complicated and make super long formulas to get.Getting this knowledge doesnt demand necessarily more complicated human centered brains..........to be continued

[minaras]

To summarize:

Viruses are the scale in which our human made definitions about life collapse and become useless.If we just consider viruses full living organisms and we expand the laws that govern viruses to all other living objects and redefine life, we can build a new system in which the basic concepts are:

a)The whole sum of living beings , if considered a single entity, is a random system of chemical reactions.These reactions over time are becoming more complicating and increase in number.This is fueled mainly by the energy coming on earth because of the sun.

b)We are a sum of chemical reactions happening and changing through time and space, so we are a part(or a small fraction) of the whole system of reactions, so we see and judje things from inside the system.We judje from the point of view of the result.

This means that we are not completely objective observers of the universe, because we are a part inside the system.We are a system of chemical reactions, and so we can judge entities such as entropy, only in relativistic terms, because our own entropy is constantly changing.That is happening because we are composed from other things, and that’s why we are doomed in eternal subjectivity.

But the question is:are there objective observers in the universe?

As we are moving to smaller and simplier objects, we find better candidates that us, but still these can also be further subdivided.

But , according to quantum mechanics, virtually we cannot go smaller than the length of the light wave, because in that case, we cannot precisely estimate both the position and the speed of a particle.So, the best candidate for being the universal objective observer is the photon.

This opens new avenues in the creation of theories in physics as well.

But, how are the laws of nature changing if we consider light as the only true observer?

I am not a physicist but a good speculation is that if we find that nothing(even human actions) can violate the second law of thermodynamics using photons as the observers, this means that from the lights point of view, there is only one physical law.Just the second law of thermodynamics.

This would mean that everything we perceive as natural laws are just the projections of the second law of thermodynamics because of our subjective point of view.If light is the only true observer, then the physical laws are the emergence of the entropic power of the universe.

Looking forward for your feedback